3. The Castle Mound

On the outskirts of Blesford, where pre-fabs and ragged allotments pushed out into real fields, Alexander, still running, came to the Castle Mound. The Castle, which had briefly housed the defeated Richard II, was now a stone shell encircling mown humps and hillocks with the ambivalently bursting appearance of grave-mounds: iron labels indicated the sites of dried well, vanished defences, foundations of bedchambers.

Outside this trim anonymity was a piece of wasteland, once an Officers’ Training Camp, where there was a semi-circle of battered Nissen huts on splitting tarmac; through long cracks in the surface willow-herb and groundsel poked weak, tenacious stems. There was no flagpole in the concrete slot: no cars in the designated car park: the place appeared, not recently, to have undergone a successful siege. The huts let out, through dangling doors, a strong smell of stale urine. In one, a long row of basins and urinals had been deliberately shattered and fouled. The regulars, Alexander saw, were there. A circle of grubby boys lifted their heads from the cupped glow of matches as he passed. In a doorway a gaggle of girls whispered and shrilled, leaning together, arm in arm. The largest, skinny and provocative, thirteen maybe, stared boldly. She wore a drooping flowered dress in artificial silk, and a startling red latticed snood. A cigarette stub glowed and faded in one corner of her pointed mouth. Alexander made a rushed and incompetent gesture of salutation. He imagined they knew very well why he, why anyone, went there.

Over a wire fence he saw her, walking briskly away from him across the only field, through thistles and cowpats. She had her hands thrust deeply into the pockets of a raincoat, whose blue skirts stood out in a stiff cone above tiny ankles and feet. Her head, gallant in a red cotton square, was down. He was terribly moved; he went after her; under the trees of the little wood, over the stile, he caught up with her and kissed her.

“My love,” said Alexander. “My love.”

“Look,” she said in a rush, “I really can’t stay, I’ve left Thomas sleeping, I shouldn’t take such risks, I must go home …”

“Darling,” said Alexander. “I was late. I get so afraid of being early and losing my nerve, I make myself late …”

“Yes, well, it’s as well one of us isn’t. Isn’t afraid, I mean.”

She took his hand, however. Both were trembling. The euphoria of the early evening returned.

“A good day?” she enquired, dry and nervous.

“A wonderful day. Jenny, listen, Jenny …” He told her about the play.

She listened in silence. He heard his own voice fade. “Jenny?”

“I’m very glad. Well, of course I’m glad.”

She was trying to edge her hand away. Alexander was entranced by this small resistance. The trouble was, or the delight was, that he was entirely entranced by her. If she was irritated, which she frequently was, her stopped-off movements of wrath filled him with intense pleasure. If she looked furiously away he stared with intense pleasure at her ear and the muscle of her neck. His feelings were insanely simple and persistent. Once, when he had tried to explain them, she had got very angry indeed.

Now, he saw he must do something. He tugged at her wrist: her hand was back in her pocket.

“You aren’t pleased. I’m sorry I was late.”

“That’s immaterial. I expected you to be late. I expect I’m selfish. If the play’s a success – which it will be – I shall see less and less of you. If it’s enough of a success you’ll go away altogether. I would, if I were you, I …”

“Don’t be silly. I might make a bit of money. If I had a bit of money, I’d get a car.”

“You always talk as though a car would transfigure everything.”

“It would make a difference.”

“Not much.”

“We could get away –”

“Where to? For how long? There’s no point in any of all this.”

“Jenny – you could have a part in the, in my play.” They had had the car conversation so many times. “Then we should see each other every day. It would be what it was in the beginning.”

“Would it?” she said, stopping, however, and leaning against him, so that he felt dizzy. “We live in a perpetual beginning anyway. We might just as well stop.”

“We love each other. We agreed, we must take what little we can …”

That was where it always came to.

It was her husband, Geoffrey Parry, the German master, who had asked shyly if Alexander could find her a part in The Lady’s Not for Burning. He had hoped, he said, it might prove therapeutic for post-natal depression. Alexander had taken in Mrs Parry only vaguely, plodding across the school lawns gracelessly bulbous as tiny women, in his experience, tended to be. He had courteously heard her read, in his rooms, over a glass of sherry, a whirlwind Cleopatra, a chanting and lyrical Jennet, almost overpowering in so small a space. He had cast her as Jennet, naturally. Talent was sparse at Blesford Ride. Geoffrey had thanked him.

In rehearsal he had come to dislike her. She knew her own part, the rehearsal schedule, and everybody else’s part, after the first two days. She suggested cuts, changes in moves, possibly useful curtain music. She prompted without being asked, and offered suggestions to other actors on how to speak their lines. She made Alexander nervous and the rest of the cast uncoordinated and insecure. One day, practising with Alexander in the music-holes, airless poky places under the stage, she corrected his grammar, queried his casting, and corrected his quotations in the same sentence. He told her, mildly, not to treat everything as a matter of life and death.

She stood back, swayed, sprung at him, and aimed a wild blow at his face. He stepped backwards, fell over the gilt music-stand, hit his head on the piano and crashed to the floor. Blood trickled where the piano had wounded the base of his skull and where Jenny’s nails had ripped his cheek. She, so furiously launched, came down on top of him, babbling that it was a matter of life and death, to her it was, her life and death, the baby smelled and was boring and the boys smelled worse and were more boring and everyone in the boring place was obsessed by the appalling boys. She struggled to her knees between Alexander’s outspread legs in the dust, pushing crossly at falling locks of long black hair.

“I see life is just a regression. The nearest we ever come in this place to what I once thought was real conversation is when we play at students playing at actors playing at medieval witches and soldiers. Flimsy whimsy. So I get bossy and insufferable and you get patronising, and gently point it out.”

She aimed another blow at him, which he parried, simply covering his face with his arm, smiling at her.

“When I was a student I was fool enough to suppose life opened up once you got out of university. But what I’ve got is complete closure. No talk, no thought, no hope. You can’t imagine how it is.”

Alexander had become, perhaps unavoidably, the major confidant of a string of energetic young married women, bored, lonely and unemployed in a small male community. He thought he knew very well how it was, but had no intention of saying so to her. Instead, he pulled her down on top of him, folded his arms round her, and kissed her.

Staff plays only took place every two or three years. This was because the community took time to recover from upheavals invariably caused by the unaccustomed combination of drink, drama and undress. Alexander, usually an amused observer, felt at first tarnished by the conventional development of the flirtation that followed, with visits to the Ladies’ Dressing Room and its atmosphere of timid, burlesque licentiousness. He did not like to disappoint. He hooked his leading lady into her gowns, adjusted d'ecollet'es, put a cheek, lips, against little round breasts, when no one was apparently looking. But his embarrassment had to give way before her shining recklessness: he responded as a good actor responds to another’s great and unselfish performance. He said, as they stood, waiting to go on, on the First Night, “You know I love you,” and watched her confusion, heat and hope improve her performance as he had supposed it would. He meant, he intended, to take her to bed when it was over.

That was almost a year ago. A year of snatched brief meetings, of pre-arranged phone calls, of hiding and running, of letters and lies. The letters had run beside his play; phrases from the letters had run into his play. The letters had discussed, with wit, with gentleness, with salacity, with impatience, with quotations, with four-lettered words and increasingly elaborated details the moment when a bed would be available and they would lie in it. It was almost, he thought, now, as if the letters were the truth. So much joint imagination had been expended on the act that it was as though they did, innocently, carnally know each other.

The Castle Wood, at the root of the Mound, was beleaguered by new building and cramped. They had quickly discovered where they could sit in it without exposing themselves. Their hiding-places almost always showed signs of other recent occupation. There were times, when the initial recklessness persisted, when they found these amusing, when their love transmuted depressed leaves and lipsticked tissues into new matter of interest. Once Jenny unearthed a used sheath in a half-empty can of baked beans. “Ersatz domestic bliss,” she remarked, primly, as Alexander chucked it over the neighbouring bushes, and Alexander said, “A non-fertility rite, take it all in all, what with boiled beans and intercepted seed,” and they had both laughed a great deal.

He whipped away a torn newspaper and arranged her in a hollow, back against a tree. With his left arm round her, he began to undo her clothes with his right. She put a hand on his thigh.

“I always imagine rows of grinning boys will bob up out of the brambles. This wood always feels full of boys. Nosing things out …”

“You’re obsessed by boys.”

“I know. It’s awful. It never occurred to me I was going to loathe them. Poor little Thomas will grow up into one. I’m not having him on a scholarship at the School and ostracised like little Potter …”

“Is he?”

He had undone macintosh and cardigan. He turned these back, and started on the skirt.

“Yes, he is. He’s never with anyone. I think there’s something wrong with him. I saw him the other day running up and down like a rabbit, in all directions, for no reason, all alone in Far Field. Then lying down.”

Alexander laid bare her throat and breast. He made a folded frame of her clothing: she sat, still as a statue; he sighed and laid his face on hers. She shivered.

“Alexander – do you like boys?”

“Hush.”

“No, but do you?”

“Are you suspecting me of being queer? All wives suspect all unmarried masters of being queer.” He moved his face contentedly against the skin he’d bared. “No, I like them to teach, not to touch. I’ve never wanted to make a grab at one, or anything.”

He thought, his head comfortable on her breast, that he’d never been quite overwhelmed by desire to touch anyone. There had never been an occasion when he couldn’t almost as well not have touched. What he wanted, what he really wanted … could not be said. He said instead, “Why am I so happy? When I should feel unbearably frustrated.”

“Yes. You should. Why don’t you?”

“If I had a place – a bed – you don’t think I’d hesitate …”

“I don’t know if you would or not. It doesn’t look as if I’m ever going to find out.”

These expressions of aggression and discontent were also a ritual bent of their dialogue. She sat quite still. Alexander turned his attention to her thighs. He touched the cool and solid flesh between the slippery, straining stocking and the gripping rim of the roll-on. He ran delicate finger-tips over bumps of suspenders, ridges of elastic. He moved spread fingers inside the cutting edge of the pants to the warm creases and wiry hairs, the soft. She sighed, leaned back, put a hand on him. Don’t move, don’t move a muscle, he begged her in his head, fluttering his silent fingers. Bodies in clothes amazed him, the criss-crossing layers, the varieties of smooth, solid, tugging, fluid … There must be as many ways of making love as there are people: what he liked was a slow intensification as close as possible to immobility. It would have been perfectly possible to take her there in the wood. Under a coat or blanket the risks of action, in terms of discovery, were hardly greater than the risks of what they were now doing. He believed his reluctance to be aesthetic. Forcing her, amongst twisted and knotted clothing, smashed twigs, adhesive beech mast, different kinds of damp. So rudely forced. It was odd that although he suspected the lady would be willing he persistently thought in terms of forcing. No doubt he was a little odd. He must live with himself. He continued to flutter her with his hands to keep her still and open, and thought, as he often thought in this position, of T. S. Eliot. The inviolable voice. Philomel by the barbarous king so rudely forced. And still she cried and still the world pursues. The tenses. It was all very well struggling with Shakespeare, but the other voice was nearer and more insidious. He had a moment of panic. He would never have a voice of his own. There was a line he had thought was his, or at least his with a clever modern-Renaissance echo of Ovid, which he must change, he must remember to change, the damned cadence was certainly Eliot’s …

Jennifer spoke a run of words into his thought.

“Darling Alexander, I’ve got to, I simply must, go back to Thomas, and my bottom’s gone numb, too –”

He remarked that his own hip was dead or dying and his supporting wrist very painful. He looked at Jenny. There were large tears in her eyes. Silently he took out his handkerchief and gently wiped them up.

“Is anything wrong?”

“No. Only everything. I love you.”

“I love you.”

He tidied her, shutting away the white breasts, primly buttoning shirt, cardigan, raincoat, twisting a stocking-seam, brushing down skirts. They took out diaries, arranged to meet again, promised to write. Then, as she did always, she set out almost at a run, not looking back. He always gave her fifteen minutes start.

He sat back in the dead leaves composing a sentence of a yet-unwritten letter that would somehow weave the frailties of numb and cramped bodies into the sense he had of infinite golden time and space. She left such warmth behind her. He felt possessed by her. He smiled.

When he was a little boy, alone on Weymouth sands he had always had, or possibly been, so intense was her foamy presence, an imaginary girlfriend out of the sea, white and gold and clean and shining like Ellie in The Water Babies. Some memory of this presence was behind his Elizabeth. Possibly he had wanted to be a woman. This felt like some rather remote observation about someone else. If it was right then it ought to have added some sort of energy, or force, to his play. Which was what mattered. He must check that pseudo-Eliot-pseudo-Ovidian line.

After the proper time he got up and strolled deliberately back to the Castle Mound. The male and female gangs had now amalgamated and were cooking things in cans over a twiggy bonfire. The girl in the scarlet snood was splayed backwards over the knees of the largest and grubbiest boy, her dress rucked up over her thighs. The three smaller girls were sitting crosslegged, staring intently, their observation obviously an essential part of whatever was going on. As Alexander came out of the dark they switched their stares to him. The girl in the snood, wriggling with a movement as deliberate as a three-year-old’s automatic exposure of round belly and drooping pants to any male, arched her little crutch at him, quivering, waved a languid hand and made a loud, vulgar noise. Alexander felt the blood rise to his face and move under his hair. Worsted in some primitive test of audacity, he looked away, and hurried on.